News: Book Review: The Last Christians

The
Last Christians: Stories of Persecution, Flight, and Resilience in the Middle
East

Author:
Andreas Knapp

Publisher:
Plough Publishing House

Date:
September 1, 2017

Andreas
Knapp is the kind of Christian we should all aspire to be. A Catholic priest,
Knapp abandoned a comfortable sinecure as rector of theCollegium Borromaeum, the seminary of the
German Archdiocese of Freiburg, in order to join a small order inspired by
Charles de Foucauld, live among the poor, and minister to prisoners and
refugees. His work with Iraqi and Syrian Christians in Germany led him to
undertake a personal journey of understanding that is recounted in The Last
Christians: Stories of Persecution, Flight, and Resilience in the Middle East.
That journey takes Knapp from the homes of newly arrived refugees to Erbil,
capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, where he meets still-grieving
Christians freshly expelled from territories occupied by the so-called “Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant,” or ISIL.

I
should note that The Last Christians is written in the first person present
tense, which gives it an immediacy not available in even the first person past
tense. We have a sense of accompanying Knapp as he encounters important figures
in the narrative and, more importantly, as we listen to their harrowing tales
of persecution while figuratively sitting alongside him. At the same time,
nearly every chapter includes extensive asides, mostly written in the third
person past tense, in which Knapp provides important historical, cultural,
theological, and even psychological context for the lives of the persons he
encounters. Though this combination of person and tense might not work in every
case, it does here. The result is a highly entertaining emotional and
historical travelogue.

Knapp
begins his story at the airport in Erbil. He has accompanied his friend Yousif,
a Christian Iraqi émigré to Germany, on his return to attend his father’s
funeral. Yousif and his family had been members of the ancient Christian
community in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a sprawling metropolis near the
site of the biblical city of Nineveh. In 2014, when the ISIL took over Mosul
and began murdering and persecuting Christians, Yousif’s extended family fled
east to Ankawa, a suburb of Erbil, one of the oldest cities in the world and
home to a large community of Syriac Christians. Ankawa is only a short distance
from Mosul but during the war against ISIL it remained safely behind the lines
of the peshmerga, the Kurdish military. Although overwhelmingly Muslim, the
stateless Kurds have a long tradition of tolerance, democracy, and women’s
rights. During the collapse of Iraq and the rise of ISIL, the entire Kurdish
region became a safe haven for Christians, Yazidis, and even many Muslim
Shiites.

Knapp
weaves this sort of compelling background detail into a narrative that
nevertheless remains firmly focused on Yousif’s family and friends, including
Basman, his brother; Taghrid, his mother, the widow of Abu Yousif, his father;
and Wadid and Jonah, his uncles; Sisters Hannah and Salama, of the Little
Sisters of Jesus in Ankawa; and Petros Mouche, the Bishop of Qaraqosh. Once
Knapp returns to Germany we meet other Iraqi and Syrian families who have also
suffered dispossession and exile. All of them tell harrowing tales of murders
and rapes committed by ISIL, but they also describe the ways in which the
American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003 set the entire tragedy in motion.

In
2003, there were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. Today, fewer than 300,000
remain, and most of those are little more than refugees in their own country.
As we now know, there was an insignificant Islamist movement in Iraq before the
war. In fact, the government of Saddam Hussein – like that of Bashar Al-Assad
in Syria – was considered friendly to Christians. The Islamist demon was
created by the killing and chaos that followed the American invasion, and
fueled by the inevitable insurgency that came next. First there was the group
al-Qaeda in Iraq, and later the even more murderous – if such a thing is
possible – ISIL, which was born in the network of American and British prison
camps. In its hubris, the United States sowed the wind in Iraq and Syria, but
it is Syriac Christianity that has reaped the whirlwind.